


just where it lies, i cannot say

by sandandsalt



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-20
Updated: 2014-02-20
Packaged: 2018-01-13 03:48:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1211458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandandsalt/pseuds/sandandsalt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How strange it is to watch him drink.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just where it lies, i cannot say

_I put these words for you, a kind of prayer themselves,_  
 _a way to redeem the silences these bones announce, something_  
 _about the way we live our loves, forever on the verge of believing._  
  
              from _Prayer_ by Richard Jackson

* * *

  
  
How strange it is to watch him drink. They’ve been here many nights before, will be here many nights after, but tonight she is caught up in the shape of his mouth, the touch of lower lip to edge of the cup (that breath, so slight, when the cup ceases to be a cup at all), the red wine imprint it leaves, frosted, when he sets the glass down (empty). Had she never noticed it before? A mark, a stain, these are the thing she catalogues, removes. With both hands, she collects the two goblets by their silver stems, picks them, the heavy metal flowers. No fruit, no seeds. They’ve sucked all that out. She must have noticed before, must have washed out the specter of his tongue years ago, repeatedly, absent-mindedly. She’s never thought of it, but she’s known. There are so many things you know without thinking. (His tie sleeps, folded slightly to the left. She has registered this, but not fully. She will not adjust it.) There, holding the glass up to some electric light no longer noticed, the halo left by his lips. She traces it from a distance, casts a shadow over it, nothing more.   
  
Today, she has sat with him – and sat with him, and sat with him. Meals and wine, a shoulder brushed up against him. Does the body leave these small wet snow angels? Some glow of a presence, buried under suit and skin and dust, even from a far? She’s never thought of this before. Tonight, she washes the glasses herself (an irregularity). Tonight, bent over the sink, she is caught with a strange sense of longing that isn’t longing at all. He is rooms away, but she can see his lips, their ghost held so gently in her open palms.   
  
The water comes now, and she collects that in her palms too. These things all fall out: the words in her head, the knot of not-longing, the familiar ghost slipping between her ribs. All these thoughts, all the impressions hovered just over her skin, halo-shadow-crystal-glass-metal-stem, fall into open hands, into water running between her fingers. She washes them out, doesn’t register them.   
  
The water turns off. She remembers a rainstorm, so many years ago her bones can’t remember the chill, the leftover electricity from her sister’s hand in hers. The water had been grey, painted the hills and the hills had been reflected in the open mouth of the sky. She dries her hand in circles against a grey cloth – where did that memory come from? She is bending her hand, making space for the ones it has held, when his shadow looms in the doorway.  
  
There, a rain cloud, a grey hill. Is she the sky or the rain? Those thoughts don’t register either. She likes her literature straightforward, likes herself direct. (And what of all these unnameable things? This small grey garden blooming between their feet? His shadow is heavy; his shoulders are broad.) Her hands are dry (this is a plain fact and she loves it, smally, without fuss) and she sets the two cups down on the counter. They gasp in unison, metal rims sucking air into drop-stained lips. No mouth has touched them, not yet. They’re new again.   
  
“You missed a spot,” he says – and for a moment she almost believes him. A small snort, half-roll of the eyes, she knows he is smiling.   
  
When she looks up, he is. Which is to say, he is the same. He’s exactly how she thinks he will be, always. A body carved from the bedrock, unchanging, illuminated in the quiet glow, half-light of a narrow hallway. She is stepping through the garden, wading through night-flowers, things that grow only in isolation, when all eyes have looked away.  
  
His tie is slightly to the left. Her own body is slow, sliding through the careful breath of shadows. She is reaching for the tie. It’s crooked, she realizes it now. It’s crooked and he’d want it to be straight. Had she not noticed it before? The hand reaching (open) is not an impulse, but a nerve, shaking. She’s not one for embarrassment, but the distance from the cup, from the stain of his mouth, to the dim kitchen-light swallowing his lips is distance from one heartbeat to the next, quicker, closer now; there’s light in all the cracks of her hand, all the lines – when did those get there? When haven’t been there, holding, hiding away stolen gasps of water? Secret thoughts have aged inside her, inside all of them. There is his mouth, there is her hand, the crooked tie, the skipping pulse between their chests, leaking through the floorboards –

It’s as if he knows what her hands will do and so he does it, rights his tie, clears his throat, but the breath won’t move. It’s lodged there, in both of their throats, quiet and caught. She pulls her hand back quickly – no trace of him at all – smiles, “Missed a spot.” She pronounces the words like an apology. (For what? The strange coil in her chest? There are flowers blooming in her lungs, petals scattering in the ribs. A feeling has grown in the blood.)  
  
Something inside her craves this, this frozen moment here, this stillness. Water for a garden she can’t remember planting. She thinks of water, she thinks of the sea running along her skin, salt rings around her ankles. In the future, in past, she takes his hand, dispels his fears. In the present, her hand closes. Empty. There’s nothing there now, but a motion suspended too soon, one that passed between them without ever leaving her. He is staring at her and she is still looking at his mouth, up, to his eyes. Another meeting point that connects without a feeling. His hand is resting on the table now; she can see the vein beating, wonders if she’d feel the blood moving under the skin. They’re two bodies inhabiting the shape of a house, she thinks. If he touched her now, she thinks she’d feel like grass, cold stone, a metal key. (Wine there somewhere too, deeper.) But he would feel the same, wouldn’t he? That’s why she’s fond of him. That’s why they're friends.  
  
Her hand is empty. She is curious.

Tonight, here, in the dark, she reaches once more, rests her fingers over the cliffs of his knuckles, the small bones. Light, now, brief, now. It’s nothing. Nothing more than a heartbeat, a breath. It’s a relief. She looks up. Her hands have opened of their own accord, and everything is let go.   
  
“Goodnight, Mr. Carson,” she whispers and they are close enough now for him to collect her words in his mouth. (She knows the shape it would make, her words on his tongue, the pressure it would leave behind.)   
  
Up the stairs now, paced only by her own shadow, mirrored fingers pressed together. She points them forward, towards the hallways instead of heaven. She needn’t say a prayer for her, for him, for the spaces that hold her here, opening the last lock of her door, hold him there, in the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. She needn’t say a prayer for them.  
  
They’re all right. 

**Author's Note:**

> This account felt like something of a sham without a single thing dedicated to these two. So, here's something. It's not very good. Definitely overwrought and hazy, but here we are anyway. I was trying (and likely failing) at exploring what might be their equivalent of sexual tension - for just a moment - in a direction that many other fics don't really touch on. Who knows.


End file.
